A Time of Tribulation

Over the next few years something very bad, or a collection of bad things are going to happen. There are going to be terrorist attacks on US government structures or organizations or representatives and people are going to die. These attacks will be carried out by ideologues within the US population who believe that their country has been betrayed and overtaken from within by an evil force known as liberals. In the opinion of the ideologues liberals wish to expand government to control all facets of everyone's life, to make them comply with all liberal beliefs.

There have been attacks like these throughout the last few decades as this blog post describes. What is different now is that these previously radical views are being held by a substantial portion of the population. Before living in Texas I have lived in Michigan and Oregon, in college towns and the left wing oasis of Portland. I believed I had a pragmatically cynical view of the US population as being largely ignorant, reactionary, but decent in nature. I thought Americans were not hard-hearted or hateful, but rather uninformed and conservative, understandably wanting to keep things as they had been in what had been the richest and most free country on earth.

Before Obama was elected I had subscribed to the position that the US electorate was too racist to elect a black man, particularly one with such a dangerous sounding name. I thought that while the vast majority of Americans would publicly condemn racism, most had unconscious suspicions and biases that could not be overcome. I was delighted then when Obama was elected with a very solid majority, and his approval ratings suggested that the majority of Americans really are ready for a post-racial world.

The error of my ways was overestimating the numbers of racist people in the USA but dramatically underestimating the virulence of the hatred of those who are still racist. I elieve the primary cause of this hatred is fear. This fear is based upon the changing landscape of the country, that is that the dominant position that Christian, white, men had held in the USA is disappearing. These people say that their America is being taken away from them, and they are right. No longer can a conservative Christian man be confident in the knowledge that not only do most people in their community agree unquestioningly with their position, but everyone with power does. But their America is being taken away by democracy, demographics, and the march of the ideas of concern for one's fellow man.

The tragedy of this situation is that there are those who are exploiting this group for their own gain. Perhaps exploiting is the wrong word, since it may be that the media figures who are spreading lies about liberals, framing debates in terms of Armageddon instead of political differences, and making millions off hyperbole really do believe what they are saying. But it's a tragedy that a frightened group of people are being made more frightened by these forces. It's going to end up with people dying and the long term discrediting of the various forces exploiting these frightened people.

In Texas I meet these people every day. They distrust all forms of government. They sincerely believe that not a single person in government is there for the benefit of the regular person. They do not give consent to the government by which they are ruled. They will not listen to any other view, and many of them are fatalistic about the inevitability of the collapse of the USA as a functioning entity. I wish I could show them what life here will be in twenty years, take away their fears, open their minds. But they fight this with everything they have.

Bad things are going to happen, but the march towards a better world continues.